Lecture 4

Dandelion Wine (1957):

Plot Development, Character Development (Main Characters, Narrative Point of View), Setting, Themes.

Alternative Perspective: A Gender Reading.

Dandelion Wine (DW) is one of Bradbury’s autobiographical fantasies, a novel that fully embodies Bradbury’s love for creating eccentric characters and exploring their lives. The novel is more autobiographical than fantasy (unlike its companion, Something Wicked This Way Comes), with the majority of events being daily moments of life in the Midwest in the late 1920s. The main character, Douglas Spaulding, is based on Bradbury. In an introduction written in 1974 Bradbury describes how this novel originated with a writing method that used word association to access memories of childhood.

Considered one of Bradbury’s strongest works, the novel has received a good deal of acclaim and critical attention. John B. Rosenman compares DW to Faulkner’s short story “That Evening Sun” in its use of symbolic settings that represent heaven and hell. In “The Fiction of Ray Bradbury: Universal Themes in Midwestern Settings,” Thomas P. Linkfield examines three novels set in the Midwest: Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree, arguing that Bradbury’s themes—fear of death, nostalgia, and the necessity of accepting reality—are universal or literary, rather than particular to science fiction.

Loren Logsdon, in “Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Kilimanjaro Device,’: The Need to Correct the Errors of Time,” identifies the central idea in Bradbury’s fiction as the need to correct “serious mistakes in time.” While Logsdon’s main focus is the short story identified in the title, he notes that both DW and Something Wicked This Way Comes depict characters that focus too much on either their pasts or their futures, ignoring the present moment to their detriment.

This novel is often compared with Something Wicked This Way Comes. Both are set in Green Town, and both have protagonists clearly based on Bradbury himself. Both novels share a concern for the passage of time and the maturation of young men. However, important differences also exist between the novels. Something Wicked has a more clearly developed plot structure focusing on conflicts between characters. DW is set in the summer, Something Wicked in the autumn. Events in DW are not clearly organized in a linear plot. The unifying structure of the narrative is chronological (summer 1928), but the pace is more leisurely and apparently realistic: that is, the narrative focuses on events that take place during that summer, but the underlying pattern is not clear on a first reading.

Plot development

The novel is structured in forty titled but unnumbered sections, ranging in length from one to seventeen pages. Events on the first three days of summer are described in detail in the first eleven sections. The story opens with Doug bringing summer into being at dawn. That same day, Doug and Tom go into the woods to pick grapes and strawberries with their father, and pick the first batch of dandelions for their grandfather’s dandelion wine. Later, Doug runs with his friends Charlie and John to the Ravine and realizes he needs new tennis shoes. That same night, he sees the perfect pair in Mr. Sanderson’s store window. On the second day of summer, Doug goes to Mr. Sanderson’s store to buy the shoes (called “Royal Crown Cream-sponge Para Litefoot”); since he’s short one dollar, he persuades Mr. Sanderson to try on a pair of the shoes to understand why he needs them so badly. He also offers to run errands for Mr. Sanderson, who agrees.

Later, Doug tells Tom about his plan to write about this summer, keeping a list of the rituals that are the same and another of those that change. On the third day of summer, Doug helps his grandfather bring out and set up the porch swing. That evening, all the families come out to sit on their porches as well, and the conversations are an image of eternity; Doug lies on his porch, listening to “these voices, which would speak on through eternity, flow in a stream of murmurings over his body….

Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were the rituals that were right and lasting…. the voices chanted, drifted…while the moths, like late appleblossoms come alive, tapped faintly about the far street lights, and the voices moved on into the coming year….” (31–32).

The first eleven sections set up major elements of the novel: Doug’s relationship with his family, his newfound realization of being alive, his friendship with John Huff and Charlie Woodman, his new tennis shoes, his writing, and his strong connection to his home town. Other important events are described as well: the conversation outside the cigar store that leads Leo Auffman to try to build a happiness machine, which eventually burns up, and his realization that his family is the true happiness machine.

Other events relate to chores around the house: the semiannual rug beating and cleaning, Bill Forrester trying to plant a new grass lawn that won’t need mowing. Doug’s grandfather is able to talk him out of this attempt. Later events move out more into the town. Tom has encounters on his own, with Mrs. Bentley and Elmira Brown, but he always mentions them to Doug, who then adds the insights: Mrs. Bentley teaches them that “Old People never WERE children” (79). Elmira Brown’s accusation that Clara Goodwater is a witch leads Doug to think about witches and what powers they might have. Doug goes with Charlie and John to hear Colonel Freeleigh’s stories, and the boys realize that the hundred-year-old man is a time machine. Doug also goes on the last ride of the trolley, before the new buses come in.

More serious events start taking place during the second half of the novel: in the 21st section, John Huff tells Doug that he’s leaving town because of his father’s job. Colonel Freeleigh dies of a heart attack, and Doug finds his body in the 25th section. Miss Lavinia Nebbs kills a tramp — or, perhaps, the Lonely One — in the 30th section. Finally, Doug’s great-grandmother takes to her bed and dies in the 32nd section. Doug’s response to that, as written, is that he cannot “DEPEND ON THINGS BECAUSE” machines die or don’t work, and even tennis shoes fail to fly, and he cannot “DEPEND ON PEOPLE BECAUSE…they go away… strangers die…people you know fairly well die…friends die…people murder people…your own folks can die,” leading him to the realization that he can die, although he does not write the word down (186–87).

His realization of his own mortality leads Doug to try to rescue Mr. Black’s Tarot Witch, a wax fortune teller at the arcade. Deciding that she is a real fortune teller in need of rescuing from villains, Doug and Tom steal the Tarot Witch one night after Mr. Black, drunk, breaks the glass case that holds her. But Black catches the two boys near the Ravine and hurls the Witch over. Doug retrieves her, and his father helps them set her up in the garage. Doug’s plan is to rescue her, free her from what he decides was an evil spell that imprisoned her in the form of the tarot witch, and have her tell his fortune so that he can avoid all dangers and live forever.

Soon after, Doug is stricken with a kind of heat prostration. The doctor cannot help, and only Mr. Jonas, the junkman, bringing two bottles of cool air for Doug, helps revive him. Tom tells Mr. Jonas about the bad events of the summer that he believes made Doug want to give up living. After Doug decides to live, he returns Mr. Jonas’s favor by saving the family and the boarders from Aunt Rose’s meddling with Doug’s grandmother’s cooking. When the grandmother is left alone in her messy kitchen with her bent spectacles, she turns out meals of ambrosia. When Aunt Rose cleans and organizes the kitchen and furnishes the grandmother with new glasses and a cookbook, the resulting food is terrible. Aunt Rose is sent away, but Grandma cannot return to her former culinary brilliance until Doug disarranges her kitchen, burns the cookbook, and hides the new spectacles.

Summer’s end is now at hand — the first sign being school supplies in the dimestore window. The boys and their grandfather share one last conversation as they bottle the last batch of dandelion wine. The boys remember the summer, day by day, in great detail. Their grandfather remembers only the attempt to plant grass that doesn’t need cutting. Doug brings the summer of 1928 to an end that evening.

The events of the summer are strung like beads, connected by the thread of conversations as the characters take time to talk about what the events mean. The first event singled out for conversation is Doug’s decision to write about the things that happen that summer. Tom agrees to contribute to the list, so their conversations often lead to new entries on the list. Other important conversations take place on the front porch; everyone participates in these, and they occur throughout the summer.

In the sections immediately after certain events are described, Doug and Tom talk about the event. Singled out for discussion are Mrs. Bentley’s age, Colonel Freeleigh’s stories being a time machine, John Huff’s leaving, Elmira Brown’s accusation of Clara Goodwater being a witch, Colonel Freeleigh’s death, Bill Forrester’s relationship with Miss Helen Loomis and the lack of happy endings, Miss Lavinia Nebbs killing the tramp, Doug’s plan for the Tarot Witch, and, finally, the heat that eventually strikes Doug down.

Important sections are indicated through another structuring device, one that is easy to overlook: punctuation. At the end of eleven sections, the final punctuation is an ellipsis (three dots), rather than a period. A period, as a mark of punctuation, means a full stop, a complete thought. An ellipsis, on the other hand, gives the effect of a thought that is incomplete or ongoing. The placement of ellipses at the end of eleven sections, primarily when Doug is thinking about what just happened (which is how the majority of sections end), draws attention to Doug’s thoughts as an ongoing process.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Main Characters

The main characters are Douglas Spaulding, aged twelve, and his extended family (father, mother, brother Tom, grandparents, and great grandmother); Doug’s best friends (John Huff and Charlie Woodman); the boarders, especially Bill Forrester; and assorted townspeople. The townspeople are businessmen, neighbors, and friends of the family: Mr. Sanderson sells Doug his new pair of tennis shoes; Leo Auffman, the town jeweler, is asked by Doug to make a Happiness Machine. Two extremely old characters, Mrs. Bentley (ninety-five), and Colonel Freeleigh (one hundred), have important relationships with Doug, Tom, and the other children. Doug is fond of riding with Miss Fern and Miss Roberta in their Green Machine, an electric car. Elmira Brown, wife of the postman, involves Tom when she accuses Clara Goodwater of being a witch. Miss Lavinia Nebbs returns from the movies one night to confront and kill the man who might be the Lonely One, what would now be called a serial killer, who has been killing women. Mr. Jonas, the town junkman, saves Doug when he nearly dies of heat and sadness.

A number of the townspeople change because of events in the novel, and these changes parallel Doug’s experiences. The other characters deal with the problems of how to achieve happiness in life, how to deal with age and change, and how to face death. Doug also faces these problems throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, he becomes aware, conscious, of being alive. Later, because of the events of the summer, including his best friend’s leaving town and his great grandmother’s death, Doug also comes to the conscious realization that someday he will die. This crisis of existence is the sign of Doug’s maturity, his movement into adulthood, his awareness of perfect life slipping away.

Doug details this change by writing about it. As he explains to Tom, showing him a pad of paper and a brand new Ticonderoga pencil, Doug has set up two lists: the first one is titled “RITES AND CEREMONIES,” the second one “DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS,” or maybe “ILLUMINATIONS” or “INTUITIONS” (27). The first list is for what they do every summer, the rituals. The second list is for new events, in part, new ideas about what they do all the time. An example of the new things is Doug’s “finding out maybe that Grandpa or Dad don’t know everything in the world” (26). In fact, Doug’s “power” to create and shut down summer 1928, described at the beginning and end of the novel, is not really magic. This power is the power a writer has, a profound doubling emphasizing that Douglas Spaulding is a character based on Ray Bradbury not only in the details of his life, but in his role as writer.

Two other characters are important to the novel, although they are not described in detail: The Lonely One, who has killed three women, and more abstractly, Death, the real antagonist in the novel. The Lonely One is perceived by the characters as a monster. When Miss Lavinia Nebbs kills an intruder in her house, Doug, Tom, and Charlie are quite sure that the short, bald, fat man is not The Lonely One, who in their imaginations is a tall, pale, and skinny figure who still haunts the Ravine. In the abstract, both Tom and Doug fear death, but Tom, despite one episode of fear when he and his mother go to the Ravine to find Doug, has not really accepted the possibility of his own death as Doug has.